Poetry: Beyond Your Teenage Notebooks

Remember 1990-something.. you were walking around with pink hair streaks wearing your headphones, listening to Liz Phair and scribbling angry poetry about the girl and guy you were dating in a series of black notebooks. Poetry was everything then. Life was a walking chore-poem, a lived out cacophonous mess of trial and error/ ecstasy and weeping. Then jobs, partnering up, kids, pets, and paying bills got real and regular poem imbibing fell off.

Today is your reminder to read a poem a day. Yes.. a day, even if its while sitting on the toilet futzing with your iPhone. It will shift your day into a gauzy dream, where annoyances seem less serious and a bit of sunshine on your back can turn truly lyrical. A little bit of poetry can make a world of a difference.

Here’s today’s poem.

A piece by the wonderful vegan poet Gretchen Primack whose new book Kind, is out from lovely Post Traumatic Press. Kind looks at our relationship to (other) animals on the planet. It also explores what it’s like to be the kind of person who cares about that sort of thing.

Click to buy

Picnic

Peas snug in their sweet green

coats, tea snug in its thermos,

absolutely orange tomatoes. Mice

root and clack and fill

their little lungs, each eye bright

as a berry. It is easy to forget Hell

here, and that is what we talk about:

Hell, and forgetting it. Once

I tried to save a bee, named

and cared for and cried for the bee.

In this plot curl the brown brain

rills of rows of seeds almost ready

and seeds spent. I’m tired of it all

being about life and death. We are

navel-gazy, a couple of Uncle Vanyas

woe-ing and alas-ing our way through

middle life. I’ve dressed this salad

before, searching for people who Get It

while drops pock the pond and

the pincushion of the garden.

It is still Sunday after all this time;

this Sunday is as long as March.

We need to hear our hearts to feel alive,

sometimes in a bitter way, sometimes

a lovely way, hear them too fast

and too hard in order to feel alive.

This might be why people hurt so many

so often: to hear the hearts of the scared

makes hearts beat fast.

No, mice, you are not this way. No,

bees, you are not, dogs, pigs, hens.

But we are, and you are

at our mercy. You cannot forget

Hell for even a day, and so I cannot

either.

And happily, where there’s a new book, there are book parties! Refreshments, lovely people to chat with, reading, signing, a portion of proceeds to animal-advocacy organizations. You can meet lovely Gretchen and hear her read at the following places;